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1 Adam Smith: A Biographer's Reflections
Get accessNicholas Phillipson is a graduate of Aberdeen and Cambridge Universities and taught history at Edinburgh University from 1965 until his retirement in 2004. He is presently Research Fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Edinburgh University. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, Tulsa, and the Folger Library, Washington, DC, and has lectured at many major universities in the United States and in Europe. He was the co-director of a major research project on the Science of Man in Scotland. He was a founding editor of Modern Intellectual History from 2003 until 2011. He has written extensively on the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. His most recent publications are Adam Smith; An Enlightened Life (Allen Lane 2010) and David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian (Penguin 2011).
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Published:01 July 2013
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Abstract
Adam Smith’s formal legacy to posterity consisted of meticulously revised editions of his two published works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations; long-standing plans for treatises on Jurisprudence, Rhetoric, and the Fine Arts were abandoned on the grounds that there was no time to complete them. This chapter discusses Smith oeuvre as component parts of an unrealized plan to develop a Science of Man on experimental principles. Smith’s introduction to this grand projet as a student is explored and the influence of Hutcheson and Hume is emphasized as is the fact that Smith developed both the published and unpublished components of his Science of Man simultaneously. The question of the meaning Smith attached to ‘science’ is a continuing theme of the chapter.
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